Customer Reviews

The Master of Go

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1938, a go match was played over six months in 14 sessions at several different locations in Japan. The opponents were the grand master, Shusai, and Otake, a younger professional challenger. Kawabata, then 39 years old, was the newspaper reporter who covered the match for Tokyo and Osaka newspapers. After the war, he turned his reportage into a novel which still retains much of the feeling of reports. If you don't know the game of `go', played with white and black stones on a board, or if you are not at all familiar with Japanese culture, then this book is probably not a good place to begin. However, if that is not the case, then Kawabata's subtle depiction of many themes in Japanese culture and in human life, may give you pleasure. The sick old man versus the young one. Life versus death, even. The author wrote"From the way of Go, the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation." (p.52) Players worried about points, not elegance or dignity. Otake represents the new, the ambitious, the unrefined; the old master all that was vanishing, all that Kawabata mourned. As a novel about an arcane contest which still can bring out all these important, even universal, themes, THE MASTER OF GO is an amazing feat. If this sounds interesting, give it a try. You definitely won't find another novel like it ! Kawabata certainly deserved the Nobel Prize.

I have read five of Kawabata's books now and I do believe that this on is my favorite which is pretty amazing since this book basically centers around two people playing a game of Go.

Although the back of the book says that it is fiction, that is not altogether true. Yasunari Kawabata actually did write a series of articles for Tokyo and Osaka newspapers about the Master of Go and his last game against a much younger opponent. Although the opponent's real name was Kitani not Otake. Kawabata, however, did add abit of fiction to it. He changed his name and made the Master of Go a much nicer person.

Why is this book a good read? That is hard to say, but the Go match seemed to me to be just as tense as the last game of the world series. It has been pointed out before, but I must say again that the underlying story is actually moe important than the actual story. It is true that the story is about a young man defeating the Invincible master, but it is also a book of change. As the reader reads through the pages he or she sees how Kawabata made this story of a Go match something much more. He shows us how the old Japanese order was slowly fadeing and something new was coming to take its place. Good Book.

If another writer has written "The Master of Go", a true story about the competition between the "invincible" Master of Go and a much-younger opponent in the Master's retirement match, and intense single game that lasted for more than six-months, perhaps they could have used the game to launch a sweeping metaphor of the fading Meji-era of Japan giving way to the modern era, or a struggle of youth and age or something of the sort. The game itself might have taken second seat to whatever greater picture the author painted.

Instead, because this is Kawabata, we have an intimate portrait of three people, the two players and the author himself, basic and alive and honest human beings. Of course, there is a bit of metaphor and conclusions can be drawn, but ultimately the three people do not require any grandeur beyond there immediate status as human beings. It is enough.

The Master of Go himself, the highest available rank in the official Go association, is a portrait of obsession and dedication. He is only comfortable playing games, and even amidst his failing health and the demands of his retirement challenge, he ensnares anyone around him in any game possible, be in Mah Jong or Billiards. His opponent, a young yet high ranking challenger, has fought his way through a year-long tournament for the honor of being the opponent in the Master's final match. High strung, and with health issues of his own, he brings everything he has to defeat the Master in his last game. The author, a newspaper reporter assigned to cover the match which is being sponsored by his paper, unable to penetrate the minds of the two players, lays open his own feelings and interpretations while retaining a newspaperman's eye for reporting facts rather than speculation.

Kawabata, being the real-life newspaper reporter who covered the real-life game, uses his simple writing style and honest narrative to bring to life this competition in a more riveting manner than any metaphor. Charts of the games progress are used to explain the moves, details are brought forth regarding the health of the players, and the history of the match. In amazement, he manages to maintain tension in the story even though the outcome of the match is told in the first few paragraphs. The chapters are tiny, making the book as unable to put down as a bag of potato chips, as there always seems to be room for one more.

Knowledge of Go is not necessary for this book, although a basic understanding of the rules will help put things into perspective. The translation is good, but I don't like Seidensticker translates Japanese games like Shogi as Chess, even though they are not the same game. The notes at the end are very insightful however, and help fill in some of the gaps of Go-knowledge.

Kawabata's beautiful narrative mirrors the direction of east asian culture, and perhaps world culture at large, where the refinements and subtle ways of the fallen aristocracy is giving way to mean, crude, egalitarian rules and regulations designed for modern day mass production and consumption.

I've read many books in my life, but none of them surpass the beauty, elegance, and creativity embodied in "The Master of Go." I believe this book is one of the best-written of the 20th century! I also believe the game of Go is the best game ever invented! It's unfortunate that so few Westerners have been exposed to them both.

Kawabata is more difficult to translate into english than say someone like Mishima. He lets us view a pre-war Japan mind set that can sometimes seem a little alien to the westerner. This is his difficulty and his genius. The courtly aristocratic Go master playing against the much younger more modern challenger lets us see in microcosm the change in Japan from the pre-war aristocracy to a more egalitarian society. Kawabata is careful to show good and bad sides of both these individual Go players. Much is lost and a little is gained in this transistion for Japan. That is the impression Kawabata gives in this narrative of a late 1930s Go championship game. This novel is mostly non fiction and is told in a light aesthetic style. In reading this I am reminded a little of the 1972 Fischer vs Spassky Chess match in Iceland. The disagreements in this Go match of course were nothing to compare to that famous Chess match. The author was covering this Go match for a newspaper and he was on the scene as an eye-witness, because of this the narrative carries a sense of reality not often found in fiction. Quite simply a mesmerizing read.

even if you know nothing about go, this book is poetic, beautiful but amazingly tense and savage at times. kawabata constructs beautiful images which all gently glide together to form a whole which haunts you for quite some time.

I'm giving this book five stars because it's one of only three fiction books available with go as the theme, and I love the game of go.

But, this book reads like a collection of newspaper columns. You can literally rip any chapter out of the book and not lose any continuity. Each chapter is on a different subject, starts with a different chronology, and has a different point. For example, one chapter is about the long hair on the Go Master's eyebrow, and starts when he was still alive, and ends with some post-mortem photographs. Another example, one chapter talks about the Go Master's competitor's wife, and how years ago she was very pretty, but now she's a lot more weathered but she still has hints of prettiness, and how she's supportive of her husband throughout the tournament and raises their kids. Like I said, rip these out, and you really don't lose much.

It also movie-ifies the Go Master and his competitor. It makes the Go Master out to be the nice guy, and his competitor out to be the bad guy, with no good qualities at all. I'm sure that the actual go match wasn't as dramatic and lively as this book makes it sounds.

But, it does do an excellent job of portraying all of the excitement an everything that goes through the head of a very skilled person involved in a board game. I remember playing games of chess or go and it seemed really exciting to me, but afterwards when I tried to explain how exciting the game was, other people would just look at me with a blank stare. This book does a good job describing that feeling in an explainable way.

I'm a go player, so I understood a lot of the go references. If you haven't ever played go before, it might be pretty hard to understand, especially because go is different than any other game that I've ever played. But, here's an intro course. White 100 means the 100th move, and Black 101 will be the next move, the 101st move. This is the way to tell chronology in the book. Go is very interesting, in that the first 50 moves, or the beginning game, aren't very complex, and so they go fast. The next 100 moves, or the middle game, are extremely complex, and the final 50-100 moves, or the end game, are very simple. Usually the game is decided in the middle game, and the end game is just kind of a formality.

That dynamic is totally different than any other game, and so what that means to the non-go player is that none of the charts or graphs of the go moves will make any sense, because the book talks about the middle game, which is so vague and nebulous to an onlooker. At least in chess, an onlooker can say "who captured more pieces" and get a good idea for who is winning. There's no way for an onlooker to ask a simple question to go players to determine who is winning.

It's an excellent book to read for a cultural experience, since it's written by a Japanese author about a go game in 1938. I especially thought the chapter on the American visiting Japan was funny.

Also, the first part of the book makes it sound like the Go Master's final go game was responsible for the Go Master's death. I think that's just the author dramatizing it. In one of the later chapters I found out he died about a year later. Plus this Go Master dude was like 70 lbs, 85 years old, and just sat around in an old folk's home playing games all day. People like that die all the time.

All in all, worth reading, but I do hope that more people write books on the game of go, because I love the game of go.

Your 'humble reviewer' is subject to impulsive reading. I've been feasting on the strong flavors of novels by Kenzaburo Ooe and Robert Bolaño - tough fibers of frenzy and obsession - and I suddenly found myself remembering Kawabata. I first read The Master of Go in the early 1970s, after I'd begun playing Go myself. One thing led to another; I started practicing the Japanese flute, the shakuhachi. Then I began learning Japanese, and then Japanese styles of brush calligraphy. Finally, in the 1980s, I went to Japan for a year of immersion.

Ooe and Kawabata both won the Nobel Prize. Kawabata and Yukio Mishima were reputed to be close friends, and both committed suicide. All three were psychologically devastated by Japan's crushing defeat in WW2 and by the 'disgraceful' submission of Japanese culture to Western influences during and after the Occupation. Only Mishima took the lurid path of nationalistic recrudescence, but all three could be superficially categorized as 'reactionaries' from a pro-modernist point of view.

Kawabata's style of writing is the polar opposite of Oe's. In Kawabata, silence is tension, immobility is excitation, not speaking tells much. The famous swept-pebble Zen garden might serve as an image of Kawbata's prose. A English translation can scarcely suggest the 'tea ceremony' restraint of Kawabata's writing in Japanese. His vocabulary of "kanji" -- the Chinese characters used for writing classical Japanese -- is daunting. That's the reason I gave up; I recognized that I couldn't pragmatically afford the time to learn 20,000 kanji, any more than I could devote myself to mastery of Go. So, although I blundered through a few pages of "Snow Country" in Japanese, with a lot of help, I have to content myself with reading Kawabata, Ooe, Tanizaki - some of the greatest writers of the 20th C - in bumbling English.

The Master of Go is a "shoosetsu", a word usually translated as 'novel'. Probably a broader word - 'narrative' or 'account' - would be more accurate. In 1938, just as he describes in this book, Kawabata-san was assigned to write newspaper accounts of a Go match between a venerated master, considered invincible, and a far younger player whose style and manner were abrasive to the older niceties of a ritualized, ceremonious intellectual combat. After the war, Kawabata-san reshaped and slightly fictionalized his accounts, and published the first version of this shoosetsu in 1951. Perhaps it might best be understood as a "non-fiction novel".

The 'combat' described in The Master of Go involves hours and hours of sitting on one's heels, dressed in traditional robes according to one's rank as a player, hunched over a board on the tatami floor of a salon in which every aesthetic detail is part of the game. In Go, the players set white and black stones, one at a time, on a board criss-crossed by parallel lines forming 181 points. The stones are not moved, and the board becomes an intricate pattern of black and white, with an austere beauty that only a initiate of the game can comprehend. The game recounted in this shoosetsu ends after the 237th stone is placed, and after ten sessions in various inns over a period of months. The challenger - black stones - is the winner, as we readers have known since the beginning of the account. All suspense is merely a quality in the two players, to be observed by us without interference.

If you've never played Go, you'll be able to follow the account of the player's psychological struggle, but I doubt you'll experience the book very deeply. The narrator, Kawabata under a pseudonym, claims not to be very knowledgeable himself, but his reactions of surprise and wonder at certain moves during the game betray the fact that he is adhering to a Japanese cultural norm of self-denigration.

The prospect of World War 2 is never mentioned, though in the latter chapters of the book the Japanese invasion of China becomes a topic of significance. Still, many readers have taken this Go match to be a parable of the conflict between the old imperial Japan and the outside world, or rather the post-war westernized Japan. It's not so simple, in that the narrator shows -- dare I say? -- an Oriental ability to admire and mourn both sides.

Final advice? Read one of Kawabata's other books first: Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, Sound of the Mountain, and Beauty and Sadness are all available in English, and are more approachable than The Master of Go. If you find any of them enjoyable, you'll know what to do.

This is a novel about a man who has devoted his life to only one thing, and who has nothing left when that is taken away from him. The Go Master Shusai is a poignant, but also pathetic (in the negative sense) character. One wonders whether such single-minded dedication, with its concomitant success, is worth the price one pays for it.

The novel is somewhat confusing, as it has not been told chronologically. It goes back and forth with the barest warning. This development feels appropriate, however. The novel feels like a memoir.

This is not Kawabata's best novel, but it is worth reading if you like Kawabata, if you have the money to buy a good (but not a great) novel, or if you like Go. There are quite a number of printing errors in it, however....

If you don't care about Go I don't suppose you would mind these errors. But the book IS about a Go match, and is it too much to ask the editors to do a proper job?